Hi,
I don't know all that much about the blogging functionality on itch.io, and had no idea there was an approval process in the first place, but it is, unfortunately, pretty normal for itch to take forever to manually review and approve certain things, so my first instinct is that this is likely part of the same pattern. Itch sits in a very weird place in terms of size and influence. As I understand things, it is still run by a handful of people, probably with little to no profit involved. At the same time, while it's still a comparatively fringe platform in some ways, there is no denying that the user base and reach have grown over the years.
Sometimes, it would appear, they take forever to approve bundles, get back on tech issues, or, most problematically, approve and clear creator payouts. It can get pretty unfortunate sometimes ... Last year, they literally took all summer to approve the Pride Month bundle, which basically made it miss the Pride Month window by a large margin and created ridiculous amounts of stress for the organizers, and some degree of stress for many of the participating creators, who were counting on the small but significant revenue this bundle was meant to afford them. It was a mess, and was not a good look overall.
I do have a lot of sympathy and appreciation for the administrators of this site, and it's not exactly the simplest or most straightforward problem to solve without turning this into yet another corpo distribution platform, capitulating to AI, or etc. It is, nevertheless, still a problem. One measure they could take, I imagine, would be to reduce the number of things that require approval (manual or otherwise) in the first place ... I know some instances are inevitable, but I kind of feel like your use case demonstrates this perfectly. I just can't think of a compelling reason to have to manually approve a blog on a platform where one can otherwise publish content (no matter how sloppy, problematic, or otherwise uncouth) without significant oversight (certain things might get flagged later, but there is no review process per game / product / etc.). Again, I had absolutely no idea that was even a thing until just now.
Sorry this ended up being more of a musing than a direct answer to your question. I hope it at least gave you an angle / perspective on the issue you're having.